By Clyde Jolly

Clyde Jolly, who grew up in the rural south in the 1920’s, passes along these Southernisms. We’d like to hear yours.

When my grandson said that a sweet little girl he knew was “tough,” I reprimanded him: certainly that well-behaved young woman was not “tough.” A little impatiently, he explained to me that “tough” meant “neat” or “nice.” Why didn’t he say “neat” or “nice,” then? I wondered. But if he could be transported back to the ‘Twenties and hear the Elizabethan expressions I was brought up on, he probably would be just as puzzled by them as am I by today’s talk.

For starters, my contemporaries and elders almost always added extra letters to personal pronouns. Especially to those showing possession, the letter “n” had to be added. Thus things owned were “his’n,” and “her’n,” “our’n,” “your’n” or “their’n.” They said “we’uns” and “you’uns.” or “their’n.” “It” became “hit” and “ain’t” - that grammatical corruption commonly used in English high society since the Victorian era - often came out as “hain’t.”

Many other words were distorted. Long i’s became low back a’s when followed by r’s, as in “I’m as tard as if I’d been arning all day before a hot far.” Even today it is not too difficult to find a set of “tars” for your car.

“Mout” served for “might,” “holp” for “help,” awrt” for “ought,” “stood” for stayed” (I should have stood in bed), “heered” for “heard,” “pert nigh” for “pretty near,” and “kindly” for “kind of.” Lots of folks had “years” instead of “ears.”

Not only did the settlers of the South bring with them words that had been used since Elizabethan times, but also each section seemed to come up with brand new words not found in the average dictionary. In certain sections of South Georgia, a person never threw an object - he “chunked” it. In my corner of the Appalachian foothills, a lad required his victim in a wrestling match to fight or say “calf rope” as an admission that he was giving up. The side batting in a baseball game was said to be “in holts.” When one teased a companion, he “guyed” him. A person completely tired was not “bushed,” as is now the case - he was “white-eyed.” A fellow embarrassed was “hacked.” An Atlanta newspaper columnist reminded me that the old-fashioned word for diaper was “hippen,” a word whose origin is not too difficult to guess. Oldsters did not address a letter, they “backed” it. “Mountain oysters” were the testicles of a pig, considered a delicacy by many. “Peart” was likely a corruption of “pert” - if a guy quicken his pace, he was said to “parten up.” A good country word still in use is “stob,” meaning a stake. And if you wanted a message delivered to someone, you didn’t ask the carrier to tell it to the receiver, you requested that he “name” it to him.
Similes and other comparisons have always been colorful in Appalachia. A man who was “as pore as Job’s turkey” and “as ugly as a mud fence” or as “ugly as home-made soap” was indeed in a bad way, although, if he was as “crazy as a bed bug, ” it probably didn’t matter. When he passed away, he could be as “dead as a door nail.” That was the ultimate - he couldn’t be deader.

Many sayings about food were in the lexicon of the countryman of the ’20s. When a guest had had enough to eat but was pressed to take another helping, it was proper for him to say, “Thank you, I’ve had a bait but it was powerful good.” The adverb “powerful” as used then was just what it said - “powerful.” When used with “good,” it almost became “goodest.”

Expressions denoting a sizable quantity such as “a good bit,” “a good deal,” and “right much” are probably universally used Americanisms, but when a noted Southern editor said on television that he had a “right smart” of a certain author’s work, he was repeating a colloquialism that rarely appears in print, but is still often heard in conversations all over the rural South.

Ask a country character of the ’20s how he felt, and he might well say, “I feel tol’able” - short for “I feel tolerably well” - or “I’m feelin’ good as common” or “fair to middlin’.” The weather was the subject of several pat expressions. If “it was coming up a cloud,” it didn’t mean just any old cloud. It meant a thunderstorm was brewing. When the oldsters said, “Looks like we’re going to have some weather,” they meant stormy weather. And when rain streaks were seen against the sun on late afternoons, someone was sure to remark that “The sun’s drawing water.”

The sayings of rural Appalachia go on and on. Northerners “make” dinner; city folks in the South “cook” it; but out here in the boondocks we “fix” it. When we “put on the dog, ” one way of doing it would be “dressing fit to kill.” We often substitute “bad” for “prone” or “likes to” - for instance, “he’s bad to drink” or “bad to gamble.” We might even say “he’s bad to have a good time.” The height of laziness is expressed by the man who “wouldn’t hit a lick at a snake with it strikin’ him.” Expressions of astonishment started with the well known. ” Well, I declare,” or “I do declare,” and then wandered into strange and wonderful sayings like “That takes the rag right off the bush.” The last saying may have originated when a thief took all the cloths, including the rags, off a bush where a pioneer woman had spread them out to dry.

One of the areas where Americans all over show originality is in their pet by-words, swear words, or exclamations. The most unusual one I ever heard belonged to old man Will Caldwell, who let the air out of his tires every Sunday morning and them pumped them up again. He said it made the tires last longer. Mr. Will’s constant and favorite by-word, used on every occasion, was “Thus, poodlejack.”

“Thus, poodlejack,” in my considered opinion, takes the rag right off the bush.

By Wilson Hall
Wilson met Ernest Brocket while researching a fishing story on Lake Seminole in the southwest corner of Georgia.

When I first met Ernest Brockett he was sitting in the reclining chair of the bait shop at Jack Wingate’s Lunker Lodge on Lake Seminole. He was over 75 years old, but his step was lively and his eyes were clear, giving a good indication of the quickness of mind within the man. When he was not fishing or hunting or working his garden or training his dog, he was at Wingate’s talking to people in the shop or out on the front porch. And at the first sign of interest, he would tell you about deer hunting, turkey calling, dog training or bass fishing. Then to all of this, he would add his philosophy of life.

There was a group of people standing around Ernest talking. Jack stopped me at the counter and asked me if I knew Ernest.
“No,” I said, “Who is he?”
“Go over and meet him,” Jack said. “We call him the ‘Sage of Seminole.’ ”
So I went over and introduced myself.
“I guess you have lived around here for a long time,” I said by way of breaking the ice.
“Might say I have,” Ernest said, showing me a circle of his thumb and index finger. “When I first came here the moon wasn’t but this big and there wasn’t no stars.
“Times have sure changed, ” he said. “When I was younger there wasn’t a body of water in this area that I couldn’t jump over in one jump. Now I catch bass where I used to hunt deer and turkey.”
“That was over twenty years ago, wasn’t it?” I asked.
“More or less,” Ernest said. “Are you a writer?”
“Yes,” I said. “I write for Brown’s Guide.”
“Do you write about hunting?”
“No,” I said, “I write about fishing.”
“Never mind that,” Ernest said. “I have got some information I want to pass on to the world. I want you to put it in your magazine.”
“Well, I can’t promise you that,” I said.
“I want to tell all the world how to call a deer,” he said. “This information is worth a million dollars to people who want to know it.”
“Call a deer!” I said. Then I thought: Here you are, about to have your leg pulled. Your have been around fishing and hunting camps long enough to see it coming. I did not know whether to laugh him off or carry the thing along to learn what the end would be.
“Okay,” I said, “How do you call a deer?”
“With these,” Ernest said and held out his brown bony fingers.
“How does it work?” I asked, bracing myself to become the butt of the joke.
“You have to be wearing khaki or denim pants,” he said. “And what you do is take your four fingers and thumb and get a good grasp on the muscle on the back of your leg. Then you drag your fingernails over the cloth in a quick crisp ‘crunch’ of a sound. This sounds like a deer chewing acorns. A deer’s hearing is 40 times better than a man’s. If a deer hears that sound on a still morning, he will come to where he thinks other deer are eating acorns.”
There is the end of the ride, I thought. Is my leg pulled or not?
I looked at Ernest in the eyes for a few moments, not saying anything. Ernest looked back at me, eye-to-eye. “Put that in your magazine and people will thank you for it,” he said.
Later that day, I asked one of the guides what he thought about Ernest’s “deer call.”
“Well,” he said, “I don’t know, because I never tried it. But last year Earnest killed a deer so close with his shotgun that they dug the wading out with the shot. He’s getting too old and doesn’t see as well as he used to, so he has to get them in close to get a good shot, and he shoots his deer every year.
Later Ernest told me: “I’ve tried to live my life by one principle: I always try to help the other fellow when he is in need. When I learn that someone needs help, I pray to God that I will be able to help them. I have plowed fields, dug ditches, helped build houses, given money. And I have had it returned to me. People don’t seem to feel that way about each other any more, not as much as they used to. But it is a good way to live. Can you imagine what kind of world it would be if everyone tried to help his neighbor? It would be hard for people to dispute.”

Well, world, here is the million dollars worth of information that Ernest wanted you to have. Use it in good health.

Dr. John Burrison, professor of English at Georgia State University, estimates there are dozens of stories involving preachers and chicken, but he selected the best of the bunch for his book Storytellers: Folktales & Legends from the South. This story was told by Don Buchanan of Decatur, who heard it from his father, a Baptist minister:

Once there was this preacher who loved fried chicken, as all preachers are supposed to love fried chicken. And he was invited to eat at the house of one of his parishioners one Sunday. After church he made his way through the country to this house, and it so happened, as he was crossing this particular creek, right in the middle of the bridge he stumbled and he lost his false teeth, and they fell in the creek.

Well, ‘course he couldn’t eat, but he couldn’t turn down this invitation either, so he went on to the house. And, as they ate dinner, he ate what he could eat—mash potatoes an’ things that weren’t so hard to chew—but he didn’t touch the fried chicken. Well, he had a great reputation for eating fried chicken, and so, of course, everybody at the table was amazed and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t eating any fried chicken. So finally they asked him. And he said, “Well, I just have to tell you the truth. I lost my teeth goin’ across the creek down here, an’ I just can’t eat any.”

Well, he no sooner got the words out of his mouth than a little boy ‘bout twelve years old jumped up from the table, grabbed a chicken leg from off the platter, got him a piece of string, and went out the door.

‘Bout half an hour later he came back in, and he had the teeth in his hand. An’ the preacher said, “How in the world did you get those teeth out of the creek?”

He said, “Well, I just took this chicken leg and tied the string on it and dipped it down in the water, and those teeth bit right on it!”

John Burrison’s academic interest in folklore evolved during his undergraduate years at Pennsylvania State University, where he published and edited Folkways magazine. He came to Georgia State University in 1966 to develop the folklore curriculum in the Department of English, where he teaches such courses as American Folklore, Georgia Folklife, British Folk Culture, and Irish Folk Culture. He serves as curator of the Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia at Sautee Nacoochee Center near Helen.

Kudzu. The word evokes frustration from those plagued by it, jokes from those who aren’t and respect from those who understand its power. For, make no mistake about it, kudzu is powerful. Its leafy vines, called runners, can grow more than 12 inches in a single day, or between 50 and 100 feet in a typical growing season. When the vines touch the ground, they form nodes, which become crowns once they send out roots. Roots radiate from the kudzu crown in all directions and drill as deep as 20 feet into the ground for water and nutrients. On these roots, potato-like tubers store carbohydrates. A single tuber may weigh as much as 300 pounds. Try to imagine a 300-pound potato, growing beneath the ground and sending up new growth, to get some idea of kudzu’s power. Scientists estimate there may be as many as 10,000 roots per acre of kudzu. As a member of the hard-working bean family, kudzu extracts nitrogen from the air and increases soil fertility by imparting the nitrogen to the soil. Few other plants have this ability; most plants feed on nitrogen in the soil.

First introduced in the United States at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, kudzu was initially cultivated as a shade plant on porches and arbors. Later, in the 1930s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture imported kudzu to control soil erosion. Problems with out-of-control kudzu growth began in the late 1940s. In its native land of Asia, kudzu had biological controls that kept it in check. In the southeastern United States, however, there were no controls on its growth, and it apparently grew much faster. So fast that it inspired Georgian bard James Dickey to write:

“In Georgia, the legend says
That you must close your windows
At night to keep it out of the house.
The glass is tinged with green, even so….”

Today, Americans are learning more about the edible and medicinal uses of kudzu. For 2,000 years, Asians have used kudzu roots for cooking and for making medicinal teas to treat dysentery and fever. Starch made from the roots, called kuzu, can be used in place of other starches to create sauces, soups, puddings and pie fillings. Says Annemarie Colbin in her book Food and Healing:

“Kuzu is similar to arrowroot or cornstarch in that it must be dissolved in cold liquid and the mixture stirred while it heats, thickening as it reaches the boiling point. It has an alkalizing effect. One tablespoon kuzu starch will thicken 1 cup liquid to the consistency of Chinese vegetable sauce; 2 1/2 tablespoons kuzu to 1 cup liquid makes pudding, which when cool is the consistency of soft tofu. As a remedy, kuzu can be used in two ways: shoyu-kuzu (salty, runny, like a thick broth) and apple juice-kuzu (thick and sweet like a pudding).” Colbin recommends kuzu mixes to relieve stress and for sore throats, ear aches and other ailments.

In The Kudzu Cookbook, Carole Marsh has such recipes as Homemade Kudzu Noodles, Kudzu Gumbo and Kudzu Quiche. When deep frying kudzu leaves, Marsh says to “pick the tender, young leaves and avoid the older leaves and shoots which are very fibrous.”